Reinstall Sage - can I just copy my SageTV folder?

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

WHS is really picky when it comes to when it gives you the reinstall prompt.

I have found this out as I don't get the option. I still haven't reinstalled my system yet as for the last few days it is running quite well. I am pretty sure that I have either a wonky hard drive or something wrong with my controller. Every time I am about to reinstall the OS it starts working OK and I hold back. It is really hard to troubleshoot issues when the problems are very intermittent and disappear for 12 hours or so.

[Peter_h]

What kind of hard drive?

You should go to the manufacturer's website. They usually have their own test utility to test the drive. Definitely, do that to make sure the drive is oK before you put anything else on it.

I haven't reinstalled either. All of my parts come in today but I am still debating if I want to build another client specifically as a sage server.

Hopefully, I'll get a chance to test out my WHS OS partition restore theory tonight. If it works, I'll rebuild the server. Should be interesting. I just need a couple of extra drives.

[wayner]

The drive is a WD 500GB. The error that I am getting is for service ATAPI, The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort2, did not respond within the timeout period. Note that I don't have any IDE devices on my system, nor do I have any optical drives - just 7 SATA drives allconnected to my Asus P5Q mobo. These errors can happen several times a minute (you can see these in EventViewer) and then there are no errors for 12 hours or so. I occasionally get a Hard Disk 0 has a bad sector error. I ran chkdsk to no avail.

By the way, if I am to reinstall any suggestions on what size to use for my sys drive. In the early days of WHS you wanted the largest drive possible since it used the DATA partition on the first drive as a landing spot. I believe that has now changed.

I think it makes sense to not have too much DATA on the non-system partition of the system drive - in fact I would prefer it if the sys drive held no data at all. My data drives are 750GB, 3x1TB and 2x1.5TB. Should I use more than 500GB for the system, or should I even use a smaller drive like 320GB?

[Peter_h]

Use the WD utility to also check the drive. Normally, you need to boot from these tools but WD also has a version that can be run in windows.

The size of the WHS OS drive doesn't really matter anymore. I run 250gb drives on the OS. I reserve the large drives for the pool.

[wayner]

Thanks Peter - I am running an extended test right now. A bad drive is one thing - I am much more worried that I have a problem with one of the disk controllers and not necessarily the one controlling the system drive and it is not clear to me how I identify which drive is connected to IdePort2

[Peter_h]

Have you tried looking in device manager? I would poke around there. I know there is a way to do it, it's just not coming to me right now.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

Have you tried looking in device manager? I would poke around there. I know there is a way to do it, it's just not coming to me right now.

I have looked all over the place in the Details section of the Properties for my drives and controllers. I have also poked around in the hardware section of the registry. It is very annoying that Windows some times calls these drives IDE and sometimes SCSI when they are neither of those!

For example:
When I go into Device Manager I see my 500GB system drive as the first drive listed in Bus Relations on the Primary IDE Controller (the 2nd of 3 of these) of IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers.

In the registry my system drive appears under HKLM\Hardware\DeviceMap\SCSI\SCSI Port 2\SCSI Bus 0\Target ID 0\Logical Unit ID 0.

By the way - according to the WD DataLifeGuard Diagnostics it is going to take another 37 hours to complete. I would hate to run this on a 2 GB drive if the process is linear.

[Peter_h]

What about in computer management? control panel -> admin tools -> computer managment

[wayner]

I assume you mean going into Disk mgmt. This is pretty much the same as Device Mgr and it doesn't give you the controller info for the drives either.

[wayner]

Anyone ever try this (You likely have to make some minor changes to the process if you don't an HP Mediaserver)? http://forhackers.com/?p=12

[Peter_h]

never seen that before.